The Los Angeles Unified School District Arts Education Branch (AEB) has set up an eCoach program and communities for each elementary and secondary arts discipline: Theatre, Dance, Music, and Visual Arts. The AEB staff are the League eCoaches who were trained this June as part of the AEB staff team: Karen Coates, Robin Lithgow, Steven McCarthy (Theatre), Shana Habel (Dance), Luiz Sampaio (Visual Arts), Steve Venz (Music), Chris Gilman and Dain Olsen (Media Arts to be developed).

The Elementary AEB developed Arts Instructional Guides (AIG) for each discipline with modules for each grade level. Arts Lead teachers and eCoaches will be reviewing the AIGs and providing ongoing input.

The Secondary AEB staff developed Curriculum Alignment guides for each discipline. In the middle of October, 37 Lead Teachers and eCoaches gathered to learn how to use eCoach, review the AIGs and curriculum guides, and were shown how to set up their own teams and add their teachers to their teams. The Secondary eCoaches and Lead Teachers provided feedback to the guides as comments on each page. There are 220 elementary and secondary arts teachers that joined their coaches’ teams to extend and supplement their face-to-face meetings.

I welcome comments from any of the AEB staff, Lead teachers, coaches or teachers on their experiences with their eCoach communities and online collaboration.

Karen Coates presenting

Chris Gilman demo of eCoach

Lead Teachers and eCoaches in lab

Collaborating on Secondary Guide

Comments:

By OKLAHOMAR! November 3, 2007 -- 11:01 PM

Gotta Love those oh so dedicated Arts Teachers from LAUSD! This is just the tip of the eCoach iceberg! SALT's Rule!